Tag Archives: Wordpress

WordPress Testimonial Page Template with WCK

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Having testimonials displayed on your client’s website is a always a nice bonus, and helps to highlight the brand’s personality and keep up with its audience.

The scope of this tutorial is to build a WordPress Testimonial Page Template with the help of WCK – Custom Fields and Post Type Creator plugin.

How you choose to do this is a matter of preference. You can opt for one of these options:

  • choose from a list of plugins that make only testimonials
  • you can also use Custom Post Types, that attaches your testimonials to a particular page
  • or, our very own favorite, choose to get your hands on by using Custom Fields that are attached to a certain Page Template.

A WordPress Testimonial Page Template with WCK

For us, the most flexible and intuitive way to create a WordPress Testimonial Page is by using Custom Fields and create our own Page Template.  We’ll use the WCK – Custom Fields Creator to speed things up.

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Q&A about Akismet with Pete Davies

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(a-kĭz-mĭt)

Pete Davies is a Business Engineer at Automattic and you’ll probably find him writing articles on the Akismet blog.

Akismet is an anti-spam filter for comments. If you visit the website, Akismet is described as “possibly the best way in the world to protect you from web spam”, which from my experience is not far from the truth.

However, with over 9 million websites that use Akismet on a daily basis, questions about privacy and differences between the personal and commercial account are bound to appear and Pete was really open to answer a few of them.

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WordPress Developer Tools

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WordPress Developer Tools

WordPress Developer Tools


During the last 3 years while providing web-design and development solutions to our clients over at Reflection Media, we’re tried our best to optimize our processes and development time by reusing code, creating a database of often used code snipets and constructing generalist plugins when possible.

While this didn’t always work out as expected, we’ve tried to push for these goals to the best of our abilities and tried to “Do The Right Thing” as often as possible. Out of our efforts we ended up with two cool projects: BareSkin – a WordPress Starter Theme and Custom Field Creator – a easy to use class to create Meta Boxes for posts, pages and custom post types.

By building these WordPress Developer Tools we hope to save time and energy on our projects and create a solid base for more complex themes and plugins.

Both projects are in a ALPHA stage but stable enough to be of real use to you as well. I’ve been using both of them in client projects and I’m really happy on how they turned out.

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What Is WordPress?

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Ever now and again the question arises with new clients that aren’t really tech savvy: “What Is WordPress?”

What I’m hopping to achieve with this post is to drop the technical jargon for a minute and explain in down to earth words what is WordPress , how can it help you, what is WordPress.com, what’s a theme and why do you need plugins.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a FREE web software that anyone can use to create and update a blog or web-site. You can install WordPress on your web-server (or hosting account) and then use the user interface to create pages, upload images or write articles.
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WordPress Automatic Updates Based on Folder Name. Is That a Problem?

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Automatic Updates are great. They are one of the best if not THE best feature WordPress has. I’ve loved it since it was introduced in 2.7 (2.5 for plugins) and it’s something that really makes my life easier.

If I’m not mistaken, WordPress automatic updates for themes and plugins are based on the folder name first and then on the name of the plugin and theme.

Things aren’t perfect in the land of WordPress Updates.

You see, two years ago I released a child theme for Thematic called Commune. It has over 10.000 downloads and a lot of people are using it for their blogs.

A month ago, another theme called Commune was approved on the WordPress.org Theme Repository. Since it had the same name as mine, it issued an automatic update.  One of the users of the Commune Child Theme saw the update and clicked it. After all, it had the same name, it came from WordPress, what could there go wrong?

As you probably suspected the update overwritten the Commune Child Theme and activated the WordPress.org theme. You could say the user was quite surprised and unhappy:

Hi Cris – just updated Commune @ http://t.co/Cj6dycV & the format is ruined ): no menus, columns & widgets gone… HELP! (twitter status)

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Profile Builder Pro is WordPress Registration Done Right

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Let’s face it. WordPress default registration process is no good. Hard to customize, hard to integrate it in your theme and not that user friendly.

Profile Builder Pro is WordPress Registration Done Right

  • Super easy to customize. Chose from the default styling it comes with or just add css to your theme and you’re done.
  • Include the log-in, register and sign-up forms anywhere you want. – In any page, template or widget.
  • Custom Avatar for your users. You don’t have to modify your theme to make this to work. It will work by default with the get_avatar function no matter where it’s used. (bbPress is also supported)
  • Custom Profile fields for your users. Ask your users to select their age, enter their favorite movies, etc.
  • NO-SPAM, NO-CAPCHA. Since the registration forms are in unique pages they fell off the radar of automated bots that create spam accounts. (You still have to protect the default wp registration form with a capcha. For more details, please read the following post)

What else is there?

Why, I’m glad you asked. We’ve got Priority Support, Automatic Updates, Proper Documentation and did I say we have Priority Support? We’re going to help you integrate Profile Builder Pro in your site like it was custom built from scratch.

Still not enough?

We have plans for some pretty nifty Addons for Profile Builder Pro users in the future:

  • User Profile Pages and User Archive Listing.
  • Login With Facebook and Twitter.
  • Super Simple Paypal Payments.

What about the license?

Profile Builder Pro is released under GPL license (same as WordPress). You’ll pay for Automatic Updates, Access to Support Forums, Documentation, Access to future Addons and what’s more important, YOUR payment will help us continuing our work and put food on our family’s table. Fair to say that you can use this plugin on as many WordPress sites as you see fit.

Credits & Thanks

  • Thanks to our beta testers. You’ve been more then a valuable asset to get this plugin up and running.
  • Thanks to Justin Tadlock (from his page templates of user registration, edit profile and login this plugin we got the idea and initial code to make this work).
  • Thanks to Derek Herman (we used the UI from his plugin Option Tree).
  • Thanks to everyone who downloaded and used the Basic version from WordPress.org.
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wpMail.me – a concise, once weekly free roundup of WordPress news and articles

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wpMail.me is a concise, once-weekly free round up of news and articles. It’s main goal is to ease some of the information overload we encounter in our daily computing by providing with a list of curated articles, news and tutorials. Also since it’s once a week you can batch process it all in 1 hour a week, leaving you with extra free time.

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Professional WordPress Plugin Development review

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It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed books on this blog and I think it’s about time to start doing that again. And I couldn’t have chosen a better book to start with then “Professional WordPress Plugin Development” written by Brad Williams, Ozh Richard and Justin Tadlock.

This is the book I’ve been waiting for ever since I started to work with WordPress 3 years ago. As a theme designer and developer you really have a lot of documentation online. However, the instance you need to do some wild things with WordPress you realize there just isn’t enough information to go on. I’m talking about stuff like plugin security, proper way of handling plugin settings, ajax in WordPress, cron, the rewrite API and developing for multisite.

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WordPress pieces of code of the month

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I found two pieces of code for WordPress that might come in handy from time to time.

Custom Post Types pagination for the homepage

It appears there’s a bug in WP 3.0 with the pagination on the homepage for custom post types.

When we create an archive page for a custom post type we make a page template where we use query_posts() to list them.

However, when we make try to put the pagination in place using get_query_var(‘paged’) it fails.

global $paged;
 
//this code doesn't work
//$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
 
//this code works
if ( get_query_var('paged') )
	$paged = get_query_var('paged');
elseif ( get_query_var('page') )
	$paged = get_query_var('page');
else
	$paged = 1;
 
$args=array(
	'post_type' => 'cpt',
	'paged' => $paged,
	'posts_per_page' => 10,
	'post_status' => 'publish',
);
query_posts($args);
Thanks go to Devin Price for pointing me in the right direction.

Extend category permalinks to query for tags

While most people don’t need this, from time to time you might want to have query posts that are in category ‘x’ and are tagged with ‘y’. WordPress can query for that very easily, all we need to do is add the permalinks structure: www.example.com/category/x/tag/y/

function extend_category_tag_flush_rewrite_rules() {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
add_action('init', 'extend_category_tag_flush_rewrite_rules');
 
function extend_category_tag_add_rewrite_rules($wp_rewrite) {
	$rules = array();
	$structures = array(
		$wp_rewrite->get_category_permastruct() . $wp_rewrite->get_tag_permastruct(),
	);
	foreach( $structures as $s ){
		$rules += $wp_rewrite->generate_rewrite_rules($s);
	}
	$wp_rewrite->rules = $rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
}
add_action('generate_rewrite_rules', 'extend_category_tag_add_rewrite_rules');

You can add this code in your function.php file the theme came with.

Code based on: sltaylor.co.uk/blog/